From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Date: Tue, 12 Jul 2011 13:18:06 +0100 From: Ethan Grammatikidis To: 9fans@9fans.net Message-ID: <20110712131806.250ce587@lahti.ethans.dre.am> In-Reply-To: References: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable Subject: Re: [9fans] interesting(?) widgets idea Topicbox-Message-UUID: ff86c868-ead6-11e9-9d60-3106f5b1d025 MARGINS! Why is it all the computer nerds are obsessed with eradicating mar= gins? Do they actually never try to read anything using the software they p= roduce? OTHER than PDFs? I use a window manager with only 1-pixel side bord= ers, and terminals with no scrollbar at all and margins reduced to virtuall= y nothing by the idiot developers. I can't have two terminals overlapping i= f the right-hand one is on top; I can't read anything in it! That's not an = increase of usable screen area, it's a reduction! Books printed as cheap as= possible, where every penny counts in the manufacture, have margins! I spent a long time badly wanting more screen area and eventually achieved = it, only to come all the way back down again. My peak screen sizes were fir= st a 21" CRT at 1600x1200. That was okay, I did different things in differe= nt parts of the screen, but really mostly only used about 30% of the area f= or my currently active task, the rest being little more than storage of win= dows. I had IRC chat constantly visible, but at the time didn't chat an awf= ul lot. My 2nd peak involved two screens, a 1680x1050 and a 1280x1024, the latter p= urchased very cheaply in my quest for more area. By this time I had an extr= emely active online social life and was also as involved as I could be with= programming and open-source projects. I made myself ill, I felt horribly d= rained. I got nothing done. I had to remove the 1280x1024 monitor and put u= p with IRC being hidden whenever I wanted to concentrate on something in th= e slightest. Sometimes I would focus on IRC instead, but I wouldn't keep an= eye on it all the time. I lost some net-friends by not keeping an eye on I= RC all the time because I missed seeing when they were on, but at least I c= ould get something done. Also, when I did catch up with my friends on IRC I= could give them more time. Now, I've come all the way down to a tiny 1024x600 screen, and except for m= issing out on the full height of some art, I'm quite happy! I check on the = workspace with IRC exactly as and when I have attention to spare, rather th= an having it hinting at me out of the corner of my eye all the time. I'll say one thing for huge screens. They make any window management model = in the world seem all right. They crappiest window management systems are f= ine with a huge screen. This is with screens 1600x1200 and greater, 1680x10= 50 won't cut it with a crappy WM. :) At 1024x600, any window I'm doing anyt= hing serious in is maximized with no visible borders. I use WindowMaker bec= ause I can easily set any window to such full-screen maximization (I don't = want it for all windows), and it retains a 1-pixel area along the top with = iconify and close regions. Windows I'm not using are iconified, which notif= ies the program not to even try to draw into the window, an excellent idea,= I think. I have no task bar, if I want to switch I iconify the window I'm = working on and look up the one I want in the icon stack. Sometimes alt-tab = is a better option, but not often. Miscellaneous junk tends to get run in t= he chat space where there is spare screen space to right-click the backgrou= nd. Sometimes I need a floating window over a browser, and that's perfectly= natural, although it does require alt-tab (actually winkey-tab on my setup= ). The whole setup works, is efficient despite Windowmaker bugs, is pleasan= t to look at, and the only things which really bother me are looking at som= e art and the lack of margins in terminals and Gtk+ software produced by at= tention deficit teenagers who haven't been around long enough to learn bett= er, and are determined to learn the hard way. If you really are attention deficit -- I was terribly so when I started usi= ng Linux and would forget a short command in the process of switching from = one VT to another (not kidding), then invest in a 1680x1050 monitor. I see = one on ebay for =A355, a very small investment unless you really are living= in poverty to the point of struggling to buy enough food. You will have en= ough space for a 1024-pixel-wide browser window for documentation or whatev= er and two terminals next to it with nice clear text. You know what? I used a Zaurus for reading plain-text ebooks for a long tim= e. It had a 4" screen, absolutely bloody minute. Despite the screen being c= apable of rendering a very crisp 80 columns I used a larger font for a 63-c= olumn terminal, and on top of that adjusted my parameters to fmt and fed th= e output through sed to give me 2 columns of left margin and 3 columns on t= he right, just to make it nice to read, and it was very nice. None of this = "I prefer paper books" for me, I don't need it, I just need margins. Books = have margins. Returning to the topic of the thread, a scrollbar can form a margin of sort= s if it's not too bold. A left-side scrollbar would cure my present trouble= with overlapping terminals and indeed does so on 9terms. Regular terminals= are still a bit of a problem, for which I blame the extremely dense idiots= working on LXDE, and me for trying LXDE without looking into what it was m= ade of. :)